Mary's reflection in the blood doesn't match. Mary standing in front of me. The reflection has dark hair. Dark eyes.
"Stop it!"
“I forgive you.” Her voice, God, her voice changes mid-sentence, starts as Mary's and ends as something else, something lower, something with velvet underneath the words.
“I forgive you, brother. The way Valeria forgives you. The way I always?—
"You're not her." My voice breaks apart completely. "You're not—you're not Mary, you're not?—"
“Willsheforgive you?”
I freeze.
“Sophia. Will she forgive you for what you did?”
The gray folds in, grown thick and iron, pressing down over my shoulders, ballooning inside my lungs. “That wasn’t…that wasn’t my fault. Valeria, she?—”
“Always Valeria’s fault, isn’t it?”
“It was her!” I scream, spit flying out of my mouth.
Mary’s smile widens. Too wide. The throat-wound widens with it, and now there's a sound coming from inside it, a voice underneath the voice, layered, wrong. “You’re a coward, Nazareth. Never taking responsibility for your actions. Always blaming Valeria. She didn’t kill me, brother.”
"Get away from me!" My hands are pressed flat against the stone behind me, nails dragging, trying to find purchase on something that doesn't give. "Get away, get away, you're not real, you're not real."
Mary—the thing wearing Mary, the thing with the gap in its throat and Valeria's smile stretched too wide over Mary's face—leans down. Slow. The wet sucking sound of the wound breathing in time with her movement.
“Did you kill me, Nazareth?”
Her face is an inch from mine.
“Did you?”
“No!”
My hands. Mary’s blood. A poker.
"I don't know," I whisper. Tears and snot and the taste of blood still in my mouth. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't?—"
“Such a pretty boy,” she says—and it's not Mary's voice anymore at all, it's only Valeria's, coming out of Mary's mouth, out of the wound in Mary's throat, out of everywhere at once.“Even when you're falling apart.”
I close my eyes. Press my hands over my ears. I scream until there's nothing left in my chest to scream with, and when I finally stop, when I finally open my eyes, the corner of the cell is empty.
No Mary. No blood on the floor. No wet footprints.
Did I kill her?
I don't know.
I don't know anything anymore.
I slide down the wall. Knees to chest. Hands over my ears like that does anything.
"I don't know," I say. To the dark. To her. To nobody. "I don't—I don't know, I don't remember, I don't?—"
Somewhere, very far down, underneath the not-knowing, something starts to feel less like a question and more like an answer.
I killed…
